Stealing the Show Read online

  Murphy Brown, a show about a wealthy WASP propelled by an unshakeable sense of her own cultural power, became a critical darling and standard-bearer of feminism over at CBS. Roseanne, meanwhile, spoke to a frustrated majority struggling in Reagan-era America, where the minimum wage stayed frozen at $3.35 an hour for nearly a decade and where the income gap between rich and poor grew ever wider. The Conners weren’t a saccharine brood like the families of Full House or Growing Pains; their crowded, shabby home wasn’t the role model household of The Cosby Show or Family Ties. But neither was Roseanne a cartoonish parody like Married . . . with Children. You laughed with the Conners, not at them, and the laughter was often accompanied by twinges of empathetic pain.

  Barr never made any bones about her roots in the women’s movement, and steadfastly refused to soften her edges. She saw herself as a disruptor, in twenty-first-century-speak, a woman who proudly called radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly her mentor and began her stand-up comedy career telling jokes in a lesbian bookstore. Although Roseanne never pounded its viewers with political statements, it was steeped in a sort of ambient critique of class and gender inequality. Over its nine-year run, the series wove in story lines about domestic violence, unemployment, birth control, and gay marriage while off-screen, out in the real world, a culturally divided America fought over the Gulf War, the Republicans’ Contract with America, the vilification of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Anita Hill testimony at the Clarence Thomas hearings, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

  Life as a cultural bellwether exacted a price, though. Behind the scenes, there was chaos from beginning to end—a nonstop stream of talented writers and producers coming and going, a titanic struggle for control, and a star coming into her own power and being devoured by it. Trying to piece together the story of the show’s creation feels a bit like decoding Rashomon: there are so many different people with conflicting or contradictory tales.

  Depending on whom you listen to, Barr either was responsible for the show’s greatness or rode its coattails; her marriage to Tom Arnold either destroyed her career or extended it; she was either a feminist heroine or a cautionary tale. Or maybe it’s a case of all the above.

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  “A fat, loud, dark Jewish girl with no ass or waist”—that’s how Roseanne Barr describes her young self to me. She grew up poor in the Mormon enclave of Salt Lake City, under the sway of her Lithuanian-Jewish grandmother. Bobbe Mary ran an apartment building full of people who had fled the Nazis. “I would go out to the backyard—there was a big shed with trunks of everything they had shipped over, and they had numbers on their arms. I never thought this was a very happy world.”

  Barr tells me this while ensconced in the front room of her production studio. Old TV Guides with her face on the covers decorate the walls, along with a large painting of a goddess under a full moon. Her son Jake, who runs the studio, works in a back room. Every time a door opens in the building, a mechanical voice announces the activity, as if we’re in a high-security environment. The studio hides in plain sight on the main street of LA beach town El Segundo, but even if someone peeked in, they might not recognize Barr. I almost don’t—her deep brown hair is gone, replaced by a short shock of whitish blond that stands straight up when she rumples it. She arrives wearing absurdly large sunglasses, looking thin and a bit spaced out, as if all the air has been squeezed out of her. Sometimes she loses the thread of her thoughts, stopping midsyllable, laughter replacing the missing words. She was recently diagnosed with macular degeneration and glaucoma, which will eventually leave her blind, and says pot helps ease the pain.

  Many different versions of “the Roseanne Barr story” have been recounted in the media, including in a trashy made-for-TV movie and in her own memoirs (all three of them). She is an entertainingly unreliable narrator, the details of her self-portrait constantly shifting over time. There are accusations of sexual abuse in the family, depictions of multiple personalities, war stories from marriages gone epically awry. But the accounts overlap enough to establish her story’s landmark events. And with a larger-than-life life like Barr’s, the big picture is what counts.

  As a baby, Barr says, she wore away the skin of her nose with her little fist and was put in a restraining jacket. She offers up this raw image in her first memoir, 1989’s My Life as a Woman, in which she also remembers wanting to be a writer from a tender age. “Even when very young, I knew that I would be the one person in a long ravaged line of storytellers . . . that would make it out of poverty and resignation, to be a writer.” Earning the family nickname Sarah Bernhardt, after the famous stage actress of yesteryear, she writes, “I entertained like mad, because I was afraid if I didn’t everyone would start to talk about the Holocaust.”

  Jealous of her mother—“she was the beautiful girl of our Jewish community and I was her fat daughter who chewed on my own hair”—Barr funneled her resentment into sharp humor. Nibbling the frosting off the top of a coffee cake, she tells me, “The first time I told a joke, it was like a punch in the face, and I loved it. My big fat uncle Sherman was eating my grandma’s soup. He called her a wetback or something because she was an immigrant, and he would say, ‘You use too much chicken fat in this soup. In this country, they don’t cook with chicken fat.’ So, I go, ‘If you don’t like it, why are you eating three bowls of it, fat ass?’ ” She starts to giggle just saying those words again. “Everyone laughed, and he would get mad. But it was like, I was going to speak truth to power right in his face. And then I would hide behind my grandma.”

  At the age of sixteen, Barr got hit by a car, an accident that seemingly triggered a descent into mental illness that culminated in a stay at a Utah state mental hospital. “I was out of that world called Normal for a very long time,” she writes in My Life as a Woman, suggesting that it permanently altered her perspective. During a 1989 Barbara Walters interview special, Barr spoke about her time in the institution: “I’m trying to think about how to talk about it . . . Some parts of it are unspeakable. It was a very horrifying place.” Trying not to succumb to Walters’s maneuvering to make her cry on camera, Barr continued, “It was Dante’s Inferno, you know? It was a place where you come out of it and you become something else. Or else you die. And I came out of it.”

  After emerging from the hospital, Barr got pregnant. An unwed eighteen-year-old living on welfare, she decided to give up the baby girl for adoption. She then lived in a Colorado commune, married hotel night clerk Bill Pentland, and had three children with him—all before the age of twenty-five. As a frustrated young mother in Denver, Barr found a kind of salvation in the Woman to Woman bookstore, a feminist collective where she says she and her sister Geraldine educated themselves in the politics of female liberation.

  “It was a lesbian feminist bookstore,” Barr says, “and the first thing they said to me was, ‘We would prefer if you would say “lover” rather than “husband.”’ I was like, ‘I’m not going to lie about my life, and you’re not going to tell me what to say.’ So I was always at odds.” Although this period of consciousness-raising profoundly influenced her, Barr says she ultimately rejected the academic jargon of eighties feminism as elitist.

  While working as a cocktail waitress at a local Bennigan’s, she became convinced that some of her bitchy comebacks could be turned into an act. Her father had always adored stand-up comedy, and she bonded with him as a kid over comedy records and The Ed Sullivan Show. Barr saw stand-up as a safe, nonthreatening public forum for a Jew in the mid-twentieth century. Yet she also knew that comedy could have an incredible subversive power: It was “somehow about language and also somehow about politics, and somehow about rebellion, and resistance and anarchy.” She once compared it to poetry, an art form that could “change the way you hear and feel and see.”

  Her husband created a mock mic stand for her out of a broomstick and screwdriver, so she could practice at home. She began telling jokes in the parking lot of the feminist bookstore, for a mostly supportive audien
ce. But Barr felt frustrated by the narrow-mindedness of the radical sisterhood. In a letter to a lesbian comedian from that time, she wrote, “I’m going all over this town with stories about what my life experience as a woman has been. I performed at a lesbian coffeehouse and received the stunned oxen look from all the women/womyn/chicks there . . . I have a place and reason for being in this movement. Deal with me.”

  Soon, she’d found a female stand-up partner and was plying her act at a local comedy club to even more startled patrons. Years before Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer, Barr loved shocking her audiences with loutish language: “I don’t know why lesbians hate men,” she would offer. “They don’t have to fuck them.” She ended her set by announcing, “People say to me, ‘You’re not very feminine.’ Well, they can suck my dick.” The fact that she was a chubby woman with a voice piercing enough to bore a hole through your cranium—well, that just added to the sneak attack.

  There was no cultural cred in being a married housewife with three kids—not in feminist activist circles and definitely not in the testosterone-drenched stand-up comedy world. Yet Barr built her uncool reality into the core of her act. It coalesced around the persona of a “domestic goddess,” a travesty of housewifery inspired, she says, by Helen Andelin’s Fascinating Womanhood, a book her mother admired, designed to show readers how to get what they want out of men. The act took off, and after traveling the comedy circuit, she ended up at LA’s famed Comedy Store. Mitzi Shore, the club’s legendary owner (and the mother of actor and comic Pauly Shore), watched Barr’s ten-minute audition and immediately put her on the main stage. “I never did that before. I never did it since. She was instant,” Shore has said. That swiftly led to a gig on The Tonight Show, a successful national concert tour, and a 1987 HBO special. Pentland quit his job, the family moved to LA, and Barr began meeting with producers about how to turn her domestic goddess shtick into a sitcom.

  * * *

  While Barr was sniffing out Hollywood partnerships, a powerhouse television production company was independently developing a comedy series about blue-collar women. Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, responsible for the massively successful Cosby Show, had teamed up with Cosby Show writer Matt Williams, the son of an Indiana assembly-line worker. “The idea originally was to take one married woman with kids, one divorced woman with a child, and another woman who is single, put them in a factory in Indiana—because that’s my background—and explore all the things they confront and how they survive, in almost every case because of their terrific sense of humor,” Williams told the Los Angeles Times in January 1989.

  Carsey-Werner spotted the affinity between what Barr hoped to create and Williams’s work-in-progress. Soon they’d managed to combine the two projects, yet seemingly left both Barr and Williams under the impression that each was the driving force. “I was told that Roseanne was my show and that Matt was my head writer,” Barr has written. “Marcy and Tom told Matt that it was his show and that I was his star. Naturally, we both thought we were sitting on top of the world when it was just a one-seater.” Williams spent time observing Barr and her family, and acknowledged that the comedian had “a lot of input,” saying at the time, “I lay no claim to her character. That is the character she developed in her stand-up routines, and I wanted everything I could get from her about it . . . [W]hat Roseanne brought to the mix that I didn’t was the strong feminist point of view.” He noted that she also changed the show’s focus from three women to one family with three children, just like her own: “We all wanted the show to have a realistic mom. But it was going to be more Roseanne’s responsibility than mine to decide how much of an edge to keep on the character.”

  After months of meetings between the two, Williams turned in a draft of the pilot—and Barr says she was aghast. The show was called Life and Stuff, rather than Roseanne. And the sister character (who would eventually be played by Laurie Metcalf) had become central to the script, with Roseanne shoved to the margins. “My character was totally passive, like just about every other woman on TV . . .” she writes in My Lives. “My character spent most of her time sitting in the corner like a stump, saying ‘And then what happened? And then what happened?’ June Cleaver was Patty Hearst compared to this character.” In Barr’s account, when she asked what had happened to her character, Williams replied, “I just didn’t think people would like you as the main character.” Carsey urged the two to work together, but this only further enraged Barr, who complained that Williams “couldn’t understand that the female character could drive scenes, that the family functioned because of her, not in spite of her. I gave him books on feminist theory, talked into tape recorders for hours, lectured him on motherhood and matriarchy for hours and hours, but he just never caught on.”

  This was not an ideal partnership by any stretch of the imagination, but somehow a script materialized that each could live with while the producers began searching for actors who would complement Barr. According to casting director Risa Bramon Garcia, Barr advocated for her stand-up comedian friend Tom Arnold to play the role of husband Dan, but the producers wanted to surround her with pros: “Their belief was she could act well among strong actors—and that was true.” Garcia had just seen John Goodman in a play, and they summoned him to a fluorescent-lit conference room for a taped audition. According to Williams, “We brought him in the room, he looked at Roseanne, and said, ‘Scoot over.’ She said, ‘Shut up,’ he plopped down, and it was like they had been married for sixteen years.”

  Barr tells me that the bonds among the actors who played her fictional family felt like a chemical reaction: “You’re giving off a pheromone that is real, and you can sense it is real. The fact that me and John and Laurie, we all love to make each other laugh, and the kids, too—we had a blast making each other laugh.”

  Behind the scenes, though, there was less hilarity. In fact, the set became an intensely hostile workplace, with Barr storming off repeatedly. Enraged to discover that the show’s “created by” credit was going to Williams, Barr protested to the producers and the Writers Guild, to no avail. She also demanded that Carsey and network executives be banned from the set.

  Barr claims Williams had his assistant producer keep a tally of how often Roseanne belched and farted while entertaining the audience in between tapings, to prove how unmanageable she was. Things got so bad that Goodman and Metcalf were asked if they would do the show without Barr; they refused. Goodman told a reporter years later that “there would have been no show as far as I was concerned . . . Because she was, in her own beautiful way, she was always right, you know?”

  During the filming of the fourth episode, Barr had a meltdown after a confrontation with the show’s wardrobe master over her character’s clothing. “I wanted vintage plaid shirts, T-shirts, and jeans, not purple stretch pants with green-and-blue smocks,” she wrote in New York magazine years later, but was told that one of Williams’s producers had asked the wardrobe master to ignore Roseanne’s requests. “I grabbed a pair of wardrobe scissors and ran up to the big house to confront the producer . . . I walked into this woman’s office, held the scissors up to show her I meant business, and said, ‘Bitch, do you want me to cut you?’ ”

  Not one to keep her fury bottled up, Barr also posted a declaration of war on her dressing room door. It read in part: THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO BE FIRED IF THEY’RE NOT NICE TO ME. PEOPLE WHO I AM THE BOSS OF—EVERYBODY . . . ALL PRODUCERS, ALL WRITERS, ALL SUBJECT TO CHANGE. Among the names that followed was the president of ABC. She would regularly update her shit list, keeping track of anyone who opposed her until the series was a hit and she had free rein.

  Then there was Barr’s infamous bed-in. Unlike John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s publicity stunt, this was not a politically idealistic spectacle of love and peace but a declaration of war. Upset by a line in a script that she believed undermined her character—she was supposed to tell Dan, “Well, you’re my equal in bed, but that’s it”—Barr sat in the Conners’ bed and refuse
d to say the words. She insisted it was not something Roseanne Conner would utter: she might rib him for not doing housework, but she would never outright demean him. Although Barr sometimes rewrote dialogue, this time Williams was adamant that she say the line as written.

  Lawyers were brought in to try to compel her, but still she refused. Barr says she spent the next day in her trailer, until finally the script was changed. As then-husband Pentland once observed, “It was like the Cuban missile crisis, when Dean Rusk said, ‘The other guy blinked.’ From that moment on, she had control of the show and made it into a much better product.”

  The series premiered on ABC in October 1988, to blockbuster ratings. It would finish its debut season as the second-most-watched show in America, rising to number one by season two, just as Barr had predicted.

  Roseanne appeared at a time of economic uncertainty, as the stock market crash of October 1987 curtailed the greedy, Dynasty-style excesses of the Reagan era. Over the course of the entire series, Roseanne Conner was laid off from a parade of low-paying jobs, and Dan opened and then lost a small business selling motorcycles. Rarely had the American working class had such poignantly authentic representatives on TV. But the series made viewers laugh more often than cry with its stinging one-liners. “Mother . . . our school’s having a food drive for poor people,” daughter Becky tells Roseanne. “Tell ’em to drive some of that food over here,” she snaps back. When young son DJ finds an unemployed Roseanne trying to sell magazine subscriptions by phone, he asks what she’s working on. She doesn’t miss a beat: “I’m ordering new children.”